Weekly Newsletter

Wondering about 48fps?

As fans get ready to buy advance tickets (or, in some countries, have already bought them!) to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, you may be wondering what format you’ll be seeing it in at midnight on December 14th. Will your local cinema be able to show it at 48 frames per second? Will you have an IMAX experience? What’s the advantage of all this new technology, anyway?

Thanks to Ringer SM for sending along this interesting article from the Directors Guild of America, where Peter Jackson talks about his decision to push forward the 48fps technology. He addresses the doubts folks had after seeing footage at CinemaCon in Las Vegas last summer; though he dismisses the criticisms, he does go on to say, ‘The whites were being clipped, and we weren’t getting the dips and the shadows, which were giving it a slightly electronic sort of video look … We’ve completely re-designed the way we convert the data from the camera into the image. The highlights and shadows roll off more, giving it a much more filmic look.”

Read the whole, fascinating article here. Thanks also to Ringer Gwaihir for alerting us to this page – a site where they’re trying to make a list of theatres which will be capable of showing The Hobbit at 48fps. If you discover that your local cinema WILL be showing at 48fps, perhaps you can let the folks making the list know? Otherwise, you might want to check the page from time to time to see if there’s any news about 48fps in your area.

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